As a founder building a consulting firm I’ve been reflecting on the benefits of speed.
The thing we can do today in service firms differently from a few years ago is dramatically lower time to value.
Speed is a superpower. If you’re fast enough you can predict what others are going to do and do it before them.
But in service firms, we’ve always been limited by the speed at which we can get manual work done.
And there is a lot of manual work in consultancy. There’s research. Analysis. Verification. Report writing. Presentations.
The traditional model is to hire – Maister’s grinders, minders and finders model. That’s how we built businesses from 2000 to 2025.
Things are changing. That model is evaporating in front of our eyes.
For example – I was listening to a webinar a day or so ago, but I needed to process some documents. The task was to extract key elements and put them into a structure.
In a previous life I’d have sent this over to a back office team. Someone would have picked up an email and done the work, and then let me know. Maybe. I’d probably have had to chase it.
This time, I remembered I had gemini on my machine, working at the command line. So I told it what to do and went on listening to my webinar while it did the task in the background.
And it did an ok job. It pulled out what I needed. Not perfectly, but it got me an hour or so down the road so I could finish things off.
The real benefit of these tools is they give you time back. You get to a value point faster than you could before.
And this frees up the time to focus on making things better – to really improve what’s happening – and deliver better outcomes.
Change is here. And it’s all about speed.
Handcrafted insight 